In Standoff With Environmental Officials, BP Stays With an Oil Spill Dispersant

Tuesday

May 25, 2010 at 5:09 AM

The oil company has defended its use of Corexit and taken issue with the methods the Environmental Protection Agency used to estimate its toxicity.

ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

In a tense standoff, BP continued to spray a product called Corexit in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday to break up a vast oil spill despite a demand by federal regulators that it switch to something less toxic.

The Environmental Protection Agency had set a Sunday night deadline for BP to stop using two dispersants from the Corexit line of products. The oil company has defended its use of Corexit and taken issue with the methods the agency used to estimate its toxicity.

At a news conference Monday, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said that she was “dissatisfied with BP’s response” and had ordered the oil giant to take “immediate steps to scale back the use of dispersants.”

Ms. Jackson called BP’s safety data on dispersants insufficient and said government scientists would conduct their own tests to decide which dispersant was best to use. She said the amount of chemicals applied to control the oil spilling from the Deepwater Horizon well — more than 700,000 gallons so far on the gulf’s surface and a mile underwater at the leaking well head — was “approaching a world record.”

Ms. Jackson said that in theory, BP’s deployment of dispersant directly onto the l well head, a novel use of the chemicals, would reduce the amount of oil on the surface and the need for application of dispersant there. She said the company could reduce its use by 50 percent to 75 percent, regardless of which dispersant was used.

Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said that while the government had approved the use of dispersant beforehand, “no one anticipated that it would ever be used at this scale and this scope.”

Admiral Landry said the preferred method of responding to oil on the ocean was to burn it or to soak it up with devices like absorbent booms. Dispersant applications should be a second line of defense, for when the weather is too severe to rely on other techniques, she said.

It was not clear how the environmental agency would enforce the demand that BP reduce its use of the dispersant.

“We are continuing to use Corexit while we’re still working with E.P.A. on alternatives,” Mark Salt, a spokesman for the oil company, said by telephone from Texas on Monday morning. Asked Monday evening about the request that the company at least reduce its use of the Corexit dispersant, he said he had not heard about the proposal and added, ”Again, We’re still working closely with EPA.”

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, a leading critic of BP since the spill, and chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, welcomed the E.P.A.’s latest actions. “We know almost nothing about the potential harm from the long-term use of any of these chemicals on the marine environment in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said, “and even less about their potential to enter the food chain and ultimately harm humans.”

Last Wednesday evening the E.P.A. ordered BP to propose one or more alternative dispersants to regulators within 24 hours. Once it received a response, it said, the company would have 72 hours to stop using Corexit and make a switch.

But it also said that if BP were “unable to identify available alternative dispersant products,” it could provide a detailed description of the dispersants it had investigated and the reasons it did not believe they met the required standards.

On Thursday, BP invoked the second option. In a letter, it ticked off some of the alternative dispersants it considered and outlined why it believed each was problematic, often because of toxicity issues.

In the 12-page letter and in subsequent meetings with federal officials, BP contended that some of the dispersants that met the agency’s criteria for being “less toxic” were in some ways more harmful than Corexit. The company said they contained molecules that could interfere with endocrine function and so affect sexual reproduction.

While the Corexit products, made by the Nalco company of Naperville, Ill., are the time-tested old faithfuls of oil spill treatment, they were developed in the 1980s and ’90s, and critics say that less toxic and more effective products are now available.

Dispersants are detergents and at best are mildly toxic, so applying them requires a careful calculation about whether the dispersant-oil mixture will cause more or fewer problems than untreated crude oil would. Their effectiveness and the wisdom of their continued use can be assessed only by careful, ongoing measurements, experts say.

The purpose of the chemicals is to break up the oil into tiny droplets that sink and can be more readily dispersed by ocean currents, to diminish the oil’s effect on sea life and shore habitats.

Complicating the standoff between the company and regulators, there are many methods for estimating the toxicity of chemical oil dispersants and no single standard prevails.

The Corexit dispersants were removed from a list of approved dispersants in Britain a decade ago because one type of test used in that country found them to be unduly dangerous to animals like limpets near rocky shores. But they are still approved for use in the United States and Canada, which rely on different types of testing.

Although the E.P.A. placed BP’s letter on its Web site, many specifics about particular products are redacted because the information is regarded as a trade secret.

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